Life on Venus

Some compelling content from Mr John Michael Godier, this time he covers “10 Unsettling Solar System Possibilities.” Personally the one I found the most compelling concerned the possibility of life in the atmosphere of Venus, which I will elaborate on below:

It is known for a fact that Venus once had liquid water on its surface, like how Mars used to and how Earth currently does, and it is a fact that Venus has long since lost that water, with the surface of Venus now being a “hellish, heated wasteland” unsuitable for life. But in the atmosphere of Venus there exists a place suitable enough for extremophiles to exist, being at roughly the same atmospheric pressure as the surface of the Earth currently is.

It is possible that some life survived to call this portion of the Venusian atmosphere home, after all, microbes have been found living high up in the atmosphere of Earth as well, what’s to prevent some extremophiles from living in the atmosphere of Venus?

And as the old saying goes, life always finds a way. I once brought up an argument based off of simple thermodynamics that abiogenesis is inevitable.[1] So even though we don’t know for certain that life developed on Venus, this argument further bolsters my case.

We may have even detected possible evidence of microbial life in the atmosphere of Venus, when NASA was undergoing its usual scanning of Venus they detected small blots wherein UV was prevented from reaching the surface of Venus, and UV-absorbing microbes have been offered up as a possible explanation for this anomaly, and would also explain where these hypothetical microbes get their food, they metabolize UV radiation as an energy source.

[1] For a link to the cited paper proposing that argument in question, see here.